An eventful weekend.

Friday

I went on a field trip with around 100 4th graders. We went to a huge spinning factory: they get raw cotton from the US and spin it into thread and export it across the country. I have never seen so many complicated machines spinning in uniformity in a noisy windy building. There was chunks of cotton flying through tubes and getting pulled into thread at various speeds. The factory employs 260 people I think.

After this we got back on the bus and they sang more songs in Korean. We ate lunch at the local theme park. The kid's parents make lots of sushi for their kids and pack fruit and various junk foods. Every couple of minutes the kids would come up to their teacher and offer their left-overs. Then we walked through a museum which tells of the history of Namwon and Chunhyang (the beautiful woman in the love story). I tried to video tape this, but it was difficult because I had 4 girls clinging to me the whole time.

Then we walked back to the school and did some singing and a "dance battle." Each class of kids competed to see who could dance the best to some popular music. They cheered me on when I got up front, but surely some of these kids had better moves. After school, I rode my bicycle home. I let one of my students ride on the back to what I thought was his home. It turns out he just wanted to hang out with me. The poor kid kept begging me for cigarettes and alcohol and was hanging all over the other foreigners when we went down to the festival. Finally I walked him home, but he just wandered on the streets. I tried to get him to speak with his teacher to tell him to go home, but he just kept running away. He wouldn't let me order him a taxi either; finally I commanded him very sternly in broken Korean to go home and left it alone.

Saturday

I made my usual weekend phone calls to friends and family. Then I rode my bicycle around the parade street of the Chunhyang Festival. It is the 80th annual celebration, so there was much fanfare. There were marching bands with drums that sounded like a coordinated racket coming from a kitchen; beautiful women dressed in the traditional hanbok clothing riding majestic horses; and floats with cute children throwing confetti. There were also some amazing artists hard at work.

At Gwangalu, an old large walled Buddhist temple with gardens and walkways, lots of romance was in the air. There is large coi fish pond, temples with lots of old Chinese poems, a museum telling about the love story of Chunhyang and dramatic performances. There were people standing like manequins, completely covered with bright gold.

I took some time to study Korean on my ebook reader and do some tai chi. I sat and did some pencil sketching in front of a music stage for a long time, listening to a 10-piece band play some hip jazz-Korean fusion music. Near the river, there were lots of large sculptures depicting fairy tales; booths selling all manner of cheap knock-off goods; restaurants with full-pig rotisseries, and even a kebab stand next to a cocunut shop.

The cake winner was the cross-dressing clown men who sang along with this bizarre and cheesy Asian pop music. That attracted huge crowds and people were paying big money for souveneirs from those guys; I am sure that I found their antics funny for completely different reasons.

I saw a few foreigners from Seoul along the way and I made a new friend. He is my age and he collects trash for a living, but he speaks some English and we get along well. Later that day, I waited around for a while for my friends to meet up with me and then we finally went out to eat, but I ditched them before they went to the norebang (karaoke) afterwards. I still haven't sung in a bar yet, even though it is wildly popular here.

Sunday

I made some more calls and rode back down to see the events. I bought more kebabs and another coconut and relaxed to some music. It is called pansori, or Korean opera singing, which features only a drummer and a singer. Their voice is more gritty than melodic, but the intensity of their singing conveys their deep emotion. Later on, my new Korean friend (Kim Ho) came over to my place and we tried to cook, then decided that we had better go out instead. We rode around for a while, wandering to different restaurants until we settled on some mediocre Chinese food. We drank a bottle of soju, then went to the Miss Chunhyang beauty pagent. Fortunately, we met up with some of my foreigner friends there, because it was a pretty boring event: these 32 attractive women in unrevealing gowns would stroll very slow and surreal-like to the front, say some stuff and then walk off; then they left and changed into tight jeans and shirts and danced to some pop music. In the mean-time there were 10 minute montage videos of them being silly in Namwon that were boring. So we left and hung out at my place. Kim Ho is teaching me Korean and I am helping him with English. The poor guy works almost every day and just watches American movies for fun, so I think I am a good outlet for him.

Weekend update.

Today I had two difficult 5th grade classes after lunch and I found myself getting a little upset inwardly. The problem stems from my co-teacher's lack of control over the noise level in the class. Kids just scream whenever and whatever they feel like, and they are silenced about every ten minutes. I can tell her voice is stressing to yell over them and explain things. I am trying to be patient and say, "Listen" in an assertive tone that sometimes helps. Also, it is helpful to chant words or phrases in unison, so students know when to speak and they can hear me. This gets most of the class on-board. For those that hide their insecure voices or don't know how to pronounce the target language, it is imperative to quiz individuals. This is a basic formula for the presentation portion of the class, but it is sometimes rushed through. I think we take it for granted that students know how to say something or what they are saying, even when it appears that they are participating. For the really disruptive kids (always boys), I give them the stink-eye, then I pull them out of their chair and make them stand somewhere with their arms in the air, out of reach of things to play with and the means of entertaining their friends. I was half-way through a game with the whole class (that they were mostly enjoying), when I quit it because they wouldn't listen and chant together. The point was for the class to repeat a sentence I wrote on the board so their teammates could perform a simple task. But when all you hear is an undifferentiated mass of shouting, there is absolutely no communication happening and the game is failing to be instructive. My teacher tried to pick up the pieces, but that was that. She walked out without saying good-bye, perhaps with some shame, but we will get on the same page sooner or later. There is no doubt that 30 5th or 6th graders collectively can be an unwieldly opponent. Respect has to come before learning.

This weekend I rode the slow train up to Seoul, which took nine hours roundtrip. It dropped me off at Yeongsan Station, which is the electronics hub of Korea. I walked through miles of electronics of all kinds, though the brands were limited mostly to Korean and Japanese companies. I couldn't find a single e-book reader in any of the three six-story electronic malls. Finally, I found a sign for an IRiver store that was hiding off the beaten-path, and I bought an e-book reader for about $300. It was discouraging to find that the market in Korea is behind the times on such a useful tool. Samsung makes three models that I couldn't find at any of the dozen Samsung stores and none of the sales-people could help me find. Ironically, I believe you can buy this model in Europe and the U.S. now. Anyways, the screen resolution is easy on the eyes, though I am having some problems getting the font size and flow of text to allow for easy reading in some common book formats (.pdf, .txt). The good news is that I have a massive library at home that I can take anywhere and distribute to anyone. But mum's the word.

I am fighting the remnants of a throat bug, which got worse on the trip. Yesterday, I mostly slept it off and did some weekend chores. On Sunday, I got together with my South African (SA) friends (more like a family now) and had rooti (like naan) and chicken curry. I brought my selection of Costco import cheeses to the table with some cheap mixed veggies and table wine. We chased this with various ice-cream flavors and French-press coffee or Rooibos tea with lemon and honey. While I mostly enjoy the strange variety of seafood and spicy dishes that my Korean schools serve up, I still crave traditional Western and Middle Eastern dishes. Soon, I will make a trip to a Pakistani spice store in a nearby city and get my own Indian food fixings.

The language is getting easier. When I repeat an expression or word, I don't get laughed at quite as much. I can read hangul much quicker now, and I have amassed a collection of dictionarys, charts, workbooks and audio tools to push my studying forward. I am endeavoring to learn the vocabulary I am presenting to my students, though I use very little Korean in the class. It is a catch-22 because the students love it when you speak to them in their native tongue, but then they rain questions on you because they think you can speak better than you do, which frequently ends in mutual frustration. They also appreciate my presence on the playground when I am not busy having coffee and stumbling through the language barrier with other teachers in the lounge.

On Friday, I got together with a small group of taekwondo people for dinner and drinking. We ate bibimbap (a great variety of side-dishes mixed in with rice and red pepper paste) at a traditional restaurant out of handmade stone dishes. The makoli (tangy milky rice wine that is fairly strong) was plenteous and free. Afterwards, we went to another bar and drank soju (20% rice liqour) and mekju (weak macro-beer lager), while we shot semi-drunk messages across the great gulf of language. Hand gestures (miming), tone of voice, and cell phone dictionaries saved the day.